The concept of strategic planning is promoted in order to improve the resilience of the organization, but there is little empirical evidence that would quantify its concrete contribution to crisis management in the non-Western public sectors, especially in transformative economies, such as Saudi Arabia. This paper explored this relationship within a high-stakes setting of the public sector institutions in Makkah. The quantitative, correlational design was used with a structured questionnaire being used on 300 managerial professionals in the municipal, health, security, and Hajj services units. The data analysis was performed with the help of descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, ANOVA, and multiple regression. The findings showed that there is a strong and significant positive relationship between overall strategic planning quality and crisis management effectiveness ( r =.72, p =.001). In a multiple regression analysis, strategic planning was the most predictive ( = 0.637, p =.001), and it explained 56.2% of the variance in effectiveness when experience and sector were controlled. The most powerful planning dimensions were found to be formalization of procedures ( = 0.301, =.001) and environmental scanning. Greater scores were recorded in the security sector compared to other sectors (p <.001). The research finds that strategic planning, in the form of a formalized and procedurally rigorous pillar, is a non-negotiable requirement in crisis resilience in the context of public administration. These results can give practical evidence to Saudi policymakers to enhance the institutional readiness and add to the international literature of crisis management an empirical model, with a localized contextualization.